Archive for Design
by Ewan Spence
July 10, 2008 at 1:17 pm · Filed under Apple, Design, Development, Long Tail, Mobile Applications, SDK
Ah yes, the much vaunted Apple Store, chick full of applications for your iPhone or iPod Touch, providing the user with a simple one click access to everything on offer. Is this the long sought for nirvana of mobile app distribution? Perhaps it is for Apple, but not for the developer community.
There’s no simple way of putting this, but the screen of the Apple iPhone will only show a fixed number of applications in the store. There is going to need to be some sort of filtering in place, to provide the top picks, the recommended applications, and those that get a burst of activity. Yes, simply having an application in the store will generate some sales (anecdotal evidence shows the mere act of registering a podcast for iTunes generates around 400 subscribers without actually doing anything), but that’s not going to be enough. These digital paths are paved with gold, remember?
Developers will still have to get people’s attention; they will still need to fight online to get their ‘Super Clock’ application noticed more than ‘Wonder Clock’ and ‘Time Flight.’ They’ll still need a website, they’ll still need to capture eyeballs, and that’s not something that Apple will have clear guidelines on – I’m sure we’ll have rotating weekly picks of apps (much as we do with podcasts) but the process of how these are chosen is going to be murky at best.
How long until we hear developer ‘A’ claim that Apple is favouring developer ‘B’ and giving them help, promoting them in the ratings, just because ‘A’ is in the Valley and ‘B’ is in Poland? Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s going to take very careful management of expectations and customer handling to navigate choppy waters – and the price drop on the iPhone rises up like the rocks of a Siren as to what can happen when it goes awry.
The more Apple become a services company with day to ay contact with the paranoid world, the less they become a distant faraway godlike visionary hardware company. This is going to be a very interesting period for the Cupertino company, and it’s interesting to me that they’re holding onto as much of the delivery chain as possible.
Developers write the app, submit the app, and then relaise that their influence becomes much more limited. They need to spend their marketing effort pushing Apple’s Store as well as their product – smart move on Apple’s part, having every developer shill their Store to their users (for which they’ll only take a small percentage of any software purchase fee).
What it does do is leave Apple as the sole distributor of pretty much every application that’s going to be written for the iPhone. Unlike Windows Mobile, where a .cab file can be hosted anywhere and downloaded from any URL to the phone; unlike a .sisx file in Symbian OS which again can be downloaded from anywhere; unlike .jar and .jad packages that are pretty much universal. Competition is a good thing, and having options at every part of the delivery chain is key. If Walmart doesn’t like a trucking company, they get another one.
Yet Apple has control of the last mile – from their server to the hardware. They’ve bypassed the network carriers. They’ve bypassed the traditional third party application stores like Handango. To a certain extent they’ve neutered the free (as in choice) route to market that developers have traditionally had to reach their customers.
The bottom line is Apple’s bottom line. They’re not giving up an inch more than they have to. So yes, the Apple App Store may look like a silver lined cloud, but the cloud may rain on some people’s perceptions of the company.
by Ewan Spence
June 2, 2008 at 9:13 am · Filed under Apple, Design, Development, Devices, Nokia
Don’t you just love it when you have to companies start moving in completely opposite directions? Especially when those two companies are rather important in the smartphone and messaging space, and they end up in the same place?
I’m talking about Nokia and Apple, which definitely aren’t N/A to the mobile space. Last week Nokia invited me to attend their S60 Summit, which was an opportunity for the Finnish company to talk about their future plans and thoughts on the space – and there was a lot of focus on their move into the widget space. Using their ‘web runtime,’ a framework devised fro the webkit root of their mobile browser, they are making development of web 2.0 enabling widgets as simple as putting together a page of html, some javascript, and a touch of CSS for the layout. This doesn’t leave behind the Symbian C++ or J2ME programmers, but opens up a huge number of new developers.
Time to change the names.
The SDK for Apple’s iPhone, along with the ability to use the iTunes store to distribute and sell native C++ applications that run on the phone is due to make a big impact this summer. People are itching to get access to the device, the extra onboard features, and to run “outside the browser.” Previously developers only had access to iPhone users by web based widgets, that ran on basic html, with a touch of javascript and CSS, in the browser. (Jailbreaking doesn’t count, just as running iPhone widgets on an N95 didn’t count either, m’kay).
The true balance point isn’t at the extremes of ‘all widgets’ pr ‘all native code,’ but somewhere in-between. The manufacturers have come around to that thinking, and are now going to be able to be compared on a like for like basis; both by developers looking at coding environments, and end-users looking at the respective software catalogues. Now the hardware on each side is pretty much defined for the next eighteen months beyond incremental steps (such as stepping up to 3G), the true battle of the hearts and minds is going to be in software.
Gentlemen, start your dev-kits!
by Imran Ali
May 26, 2008 at 6:58 am · Filed under Design, Mobile messaging 2.0, Usage + Usability, User Interface, iPhone
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of arranging and attending an evening talk by one of the mobile industry’s unsung heroes, Clive Grinyer.
Until the beginning of May, and for the last several years Clive was alternately the Director of Customer Experience and Design & Usability at France Telecom’s mobile operator, Orange.
Prior to this, Clive’s led the UK’s Design Council, Samsung’s design group, roles at TAG McLaren, IDEO and also co-founded a design practice with Apple’s Jonathan Ive.
With such a stellar pedigree, Clive was tasked with imagining France Telecom’s new era of converged mobile, broadband, TV and fixed telephony services.
The focus of Clive’s talk was the poor application of design processes as an afterthought in technology. Design is often appled too late as a ’skinning’ activity rather than early on where design can impact the decisions that deeply affect the user experience; and for Clive user experience encompasses everything from retail stores to packaging, product design, devices & service interfaces as well as customer support.
Though the talk took place a day before Clive left Orange for the consultancy wing of Cisco, joining as their Director of Customer Experience, he touched upon some of the legacy of his time at one of the world’s largest cellcos and alluded to somequite exciting products and services, due to be launched in the next few weeks.
I thoroughly recommend Clive’s three talks, downloadable as PDFs from his website…
- Lipstick On A Pig - the focus of the talks earlier this month.
- The Silence Of Design - exploring the gulf of understanding between designer’s work and user’s experiences.
- The Design Toolbox - covering the basic elements of design for products, user interfaces and service design; notably elements that are applicable for designers and non-designers.
As design-centric companies like Apple pull ahead of their competitors in sectors such as mobility, computing and service design, it’s becoming increasingly important for companies to understand how to understand, replicate employ such practices in their own philosophies. Clive’s work is a great starting point in this journey.
by Imran Ali
March 25, 2008 at 8:09 pm · Filed under Design, Events, London, Olympics, UK
I was recently invited to an intriguing workshop…unfortunately I can’t attend, but here’s another sign of London’s role as a global hothouse for mobile innovation.
Next Thursday, Living Labs Europe is holding a half-day creative workshop on the development of mobile urban services for the 2012 Olympics, to be hosted in London. The Flaneurs: The network is the city event will bring together around 50 participants during the afternoon of Thursday 27th March.
The group’s objective is to explore interaction, experience and service design with a view to develop applications or services that may be showcased in the period leading up to and including the 2012 Olympics; the ideas and concepts which emerge from the workshop will be circulated amongst the industry to inspire others to conceive of new opportunities.
There’ll be a bunch of speakers interspersed throughout the workshop, most notably Orange’s Neil Churcher. Though I left Orange just as Neil began his role there, we collaborated during his previous role as the Academic Director of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. The work that the IDII students prepared for us was nothing short of inspiring and astonishing, on a par with NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Programme or the MIT Media Lab.
For this reason alone, I can’t wait to see what Flaneurs comes up with - organiser Nico MacDonald has promised me some follow up insights following the workshop. The group looks incredible - I’m loving that fact that there are tech people, broadcasters, public transport officials, architects and designers in the same place - ace!
by Imran Ali
February 6, 2008 at 10:57 pm · Filed under Design, Hardware, User Interface
Wow. Last Friday, I caught some images from a BBC article, covering the Royal College of Arts mobile design contest, sponsored no less by 3.
I particularly liked the minimalist Vase concept, where the phone begins as a blank slate, gradually populated with features the user desires.
Mobile handset concepts are ten-a-penny and often dismissed as fantastical and unworkable. Yet, like concepts cars, they enable an industry that’s stagnant and unimaginative to path a course to the future and open new trains of thought.
See the full set of winning designs here…Â
by Imran Ali
January 18, 2008 at 9:34 am · Filed under Design, User Interface
A couple weeks ago Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz posted a thought provoking piece on mobile design entitled Don’t design for “mobile†- design for mobility.
Merholz articulates and frames current mobile design fixated on form-factor and ‘miniaturising’ the web for smaller screens and keypad interaction. Notably, he argues that the essence of great mobile application design is understanding that a phone is always with you - not that its simply a smaller device.
So what does that mean? At a fixed device, such as a desktop PC, our context is less fluid and hence our interaction can be richer and more verbose. When in motion - whether travelling, driving, shoppin, or at an event - our context is much more fluid and hence devices or applications that can sense or predict our context or motive will be more successful by providing focussed content and data.
As Merholz puts it…
‘there’s an inverse relationship between the dynamism of your environment, and the complexity of use you’re willing to put up with’.
I’ve found myself quoting ‘mobility, not mobile’ many times in the last few days - I’d love to see Merholz expand this thinking into a number of reference examples, best practices and design patterns that can be used by others. For example, Twitter’s hugely usable SMS interface would be a great pattern.
More broadly than the sentiment of ‘mobility, not mobile’ - designing user experience should always be driven by context, not form-factor.
